ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

After Fidel Castro’s abdominal surgery in the summer of 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Cubans in Bush’s name: “You must know that you have no greater friend than the United States of America.” This great pal showed amity by ...

This past week the Obama Administration said that it does not view the Fox News Network as a credible news organization because it has an agenda and a perspective inconsistent with neutrality.
As if to prove the point for them, Fox’s terror dogs immedia...

“One of the reasons I’m here is to try to give a bit more profile to a conflict, and its humanitarian consequences, which had been fairly low on the list of the international media’s priorities.”
– John Holmes, UN Unde...

I don’t write about so-called matters of faith very much, preferring to leave that to people to whom those things matter more, but the recent announcement by the Vatican to disenchanted Anglicans and Episcopalians that the Roman Catholic Church would not only i...

Across the country, last weekend there were anti-war demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.
I spoke at our own littl...

Beyond the gloom and doom of the climate crisis, there lies a powerful and regenerative grassroots solution: organic food, farming, and ranching. Even as politicians and the powerful fossil fuel lobby drag their heels and refuse to acknowledge that we have about ten ...

In 1979, Kathleen and Bill Christison retired from the CIA, where they worked as analysts. Ever since then, they’ve had an unorthodox retirement, to say the least. With only a couple relatively brief interludes, they’ve dedicated what could have been year...

Founded in 1958 for aged 50 and older Americans, AARP call itself "a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization (dedicated to) improv(ing) the quality of their lives," even though from inception it sold insurance to earn royalties – now to its 40 ...

Last week, representatives of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (known by its Spanish acronym ALBA) met in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the future evolution of the trade bloc, designed to promote complementarity and reciprocity amongst left-lea...

Venezuela’s formal request for the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles was well founded. There is an Extradition Treaty between Venezuela and the United States, ratified by both countries in 1922, which has been implemented for a century.
Venezuel...

It is the watershed, not the nation-state, which provides the natural social formation of our species. Water “sheds” and branches all the way down to the molecular level and all the way up to half continents. Each thread from the shed is a lin...

What would Democrats do if they were serious about single payer?
The 88 members of the House who support it – The Single Payer Caucus – would get together and say – we’re not going to vote for Obamacare.
(By the way — that&...

Irene Sabatini’s deceptive narration in this haunting novel lures the reader in slowly, slowly—coiling like a snake about to spring. By the time you realize that she’s mesmerized you, it’s too late. You’re hooked on Sabatini’s supe...

It may be useful to assess the dangers of the systematically hostile attitude of the overwhelming majority of major European and North American media companies in relation to the current events taking place in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. This hostility is only ma...

Five months ago, shortly after the Pakistani government had begun a military offensive against suspected Taliban fighters in the northernmost area of the country, we arrived in Islamabad, the capital, as part of a small delegation organized by Voices for Creative Non...

"I always thought painting was the best thing to do … I don’t like conceptual art". This is a sentiment felt by many people, and one of the main practitioners of conceptual art they might have in mind is Damien Hirst, particularly for his...

Asmara, Eritrea.
As one of the first to write about the problems in West Sudan/Darfur, in mid 2003, and living side by side here in Asmara for three years with representatives of the Darfur, and other Sudanese resistance, my investigation has found no evidence...

Civil rights groups in Israel have expressed outrage at the announcement last week that a special undercover unit of the police has been infiltrating and collecting intelligence on Israel’s Arab minority by disguising its officers as Arabs.
It is the fi...

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.
The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.
Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on te...

Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth ...

Russia’s vote to endorse the Goldstone Gaza report in the United Nations Human Rights Council last Friday was an important, milestone event both for Palestine and for Russia. For Palestine, this vote opened a way to try and sentence Israeli mass-murderers, and ...

Over the past ten years, the Yes Men have emerged as an infamously daring and creative duo of anti-corporate pranksters. In their new movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (known in their non-activist lives as Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos...

The US and NATO have begun an ambitious counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan that places great importance on winning the support of the Afghan people. But there is a rarely-considered corollary in the counterinsurgency effort: Afghanistan must win the support of ...

A conspiratorial view of the world is frequently inaccurate, exposing more the paranoia of the view rather than the reality of the world. The sequential destruction of Muslim nations — Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, (and Iran is on the list) — ma...